


Vanilla Ice Cream Or, The Ship Around the Corner

by executrix



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-11
Updated: 2011-05-11
Packaged: 2017-10-19 07:17:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one with the cyber-sex and the space!grapefruit and the pool table.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vanilla Ice Cream Or, The Ship Around the Corner

1.  
Cally came through the teleport, her arms stretched to encompass a slatted wooden crate.

Gan sniffed the air. "Hjorkluds!" he said happily.

"First harvest," Cally said. "Fresh from Palmero."

"We used to have them at Crop Gathering Festival...Ma and Pa would get us one each, if we were really good." Then he fell silent, remembering and then deciding that Memory Lane was best avoided just at the present.

Cally took the crate into the kitchen, where Blake was topping a sheet pan of cottage pie with reconstituted mashed potato. After the most recent Flight Deck tiff, Blake wasn't going to spend all day spud-bashing just to avoid a negative restaurant review.

"Welcome back, Cally," he said. "Mission went well, I imagine--Vikaalu called in to say how grateful they are for the guns."

"Oh, yes...and look what I brought back!"

"Something to eat, I take it?"

"They're delicious...ripe, sweet, tangy... Oh, and very good for you." Indeed, spacefarers had long known to stock hjorkluds for their role in preventing vitamin deficiencies and space fever. Several cracking brawls had started up in spaceport tavernas by jocular references to spacefarers of other races as "hjorks," so the slang term was avoided, unless of course the evening's entertainment WAS the brawl.

The rule on the Liberator was that tasks rotated, and whoever cooked wouldn't have to lay the table or wash up. Therefore, the hjorkluds made their first appearance on a platter, piled in a pyramid on a few bright green leaves.

Avon passed around dessert plates, fruit knives, and forks, then passed the platter. Blake, Gan, and Cally burst out laughing, for no reason that Avon or Jenna could understand, as they speared the tough rind (green stippled with silver) with their forks and made neat slices parallel to the equator. Vila hooked a couple of lumps of sugar out of the sugar bowl, poked a hole in his hjorklud, stuck in the lumps and the straw from his Vitazade, and began to suck out the juice. Blake cut his into quarters with his clasp knife, and Cally and Gan peeled theirs by hand and ate one section at a time.

2.  
A carton of 64 meant 10 2/3 per capita fruit for the carbon-based crew members, and the fruit spoiled fast. Avon searched the Galactic Joy of Cooking, but the consensus on how to cook hjorkluds is "don't," and they wouldn't freeze-dry very well (although at least it got rid of three of the damn things to find out). So Avon decided to express the juice and freeze that. They'd probably be glad to see it again, someday, if they lived that long.

Gan came into the galley. "Good thought, that," he said. "But don't throw out the rinds."

"Why, do your people have a saying, 'Waste not want not?'"

"You can make a jolly nice sweet with them," Gan continued undaunted. "Dice them up, put them in the pressure cooker to reduce the bitterness, then bake them with sugar. All very well for you on Terra, but on the farm worlds, we had to make do, you know. And, if we had a bad harvest that year, and didn't have the sugar, we'd dry the fruit peels out and use them to scent the linen."

"We've got sugar by the hundredweight," Avon said. "Whoever fitted out this ship must have had a sweet tooth...unless they used it for something else, of course." He paused for a moment to envision a rampantly randy constituent of the alien crew telling another, "I haven't...well, you know...GOT anything," only to get the reassuring reply, "Just sprinkle some of that sugar on your tentacle..."

"Was that all you wanted?" Avon asked.

"I was only trying to help," Gan said. "Sometimes I wonder why I bother. You haven't been very nice to me, you know. You think you can say rotten things to me--when you can be arsed to notice me at all!--just because you can, because you know that I'm in no position to thump you just because I can. And I wouldn't even if I could, I wasn't like that."

"Now, Olag," Avon said. "Don't come over all Trades Description Act with me. I never told you I was a nice bloke. In fact there's an Official Warning, 'Evil-Tempered Sod' displayed on the front of the packet." Sometimes the remembrance that they had both been widowed at the hands of the Federation was enough to moderate his temper slightly, but "sometimes" and "slightly" were the operative words.

"Yes, that makes it much easier for you, doesn't it? Well, too bad, you'll just have to learn to put up with us, Avon," Gan said. "We've all got to stick together, and we've more or less all got to stay on the ship." That had been proved a month earlier, when a cautious experiment in shoreleave was made. Gan was the first beneficiary, on the grounds that he was the least well-known and whatever he had in his head, he had the smallest price ON it.

He did manage to watch a vizcast (it wasn't very good, he said later on) and have half a cup of coffee at a sidewalk café before a patrol converged on him and he had to be teleported out just in the nick of time. All other shoreleaves had been canceled until further notice.

"Except when we're ordered off for Blake's exercises in till-death-do-us-part."

Gan walked away, fondly anticipating getting down to the bookplaques he had just taken from the crew library.

{{I may be stuck here physically}} Avon thought. {{But there are resources...}}

3.  
If he couldn't have his first choice, Avon sometimes thought it would be acceptable to be a cat. Anna had a cat, and he admired its grace and approved its lack of subservience to the Management. But as a counterexample, his friend Julian was alleged to have three cats. Avon only had experimental verification for the two who spat at each other in the middle of the drawing room. The other one always hid under the bed. At the time, this had led Avon to speculate on just how horrible it would be to be cooped up with a bunch of other cats you didn't like.

And there he was.

At that early stage, Avon already had a fairly good idea of possible places to escape, but he held back. (Matters such as a galaxy-wide apparatus interested in his immediate death he considered Details; he was looking at the Big Picture.)

Even with all his efforts at restraint and all his wise counsel, Avon felt the best he had been able to achieve was to hoist Blake to the level of Complete Fuck-Up. He hated to think of what would become of Blake on his own. Although Avon more than occasionally compassed the thought of something wet and sticky of Blake's on his hands, it wasn't blood that he had in mind.

4.  
Even through the firmly shut door to Avon's cabin, Blake could hear a rapid flutter that teased his memory. A few minutes later, he realized what it was--the sound of a computer that had been modified to accept keyboard input. Some people simply preferred manual input, whereas others--those worried about the security implications of a voiceprint, for instance--saw practical advantages in it.

In a rush, Blake remembered the dear old Bent Engineers board where he had spent many happy hours, and wondered if it were still in operation. Memories connected to (reinforced by?) physical tasks seemed easier to recapture than purely sensory or emotional recollections, so once he found another working keyboard in the scrum of things in Low Priority Storage #4, Blake had little trouble in attaching it or getting the terminal in his cabin to accept keyboard input.

Then he set up accounts on a couple of planets known for facilitating anonymous communications, and had messages bounce between them. He wondered whether the Liberator's security could be compromised if the messages were traced back, but then decided it wouldn't be and he wouldn't be putting the crew at any risk. The Liberator wasn't in any detectable place, or following a set path, where it could be intercepted, although God knows the Federation kept trying.

Blake fully expected to await the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper...although, in all probability, not for flirting.

He re-registered (under a new handle) at Bent Engineers, caught up on the archives, and had a look at what used to be his favorite area. He was startled to realize that he felt somewhat different about it now.  
5.  
BENT ENGINEERS>MESSAGE BOARDS>MY BOSS IS AN IDIOT

ALEXIS: No names, no pack drill, but indeed, mine is a prime specimen. High lethality, low predictability, the attention span of a three-year-old. We can get halfway through a task only to be yanked into a screaming one-eighty. We can finish something only to be told to put twice the effort into undoing it. And it's not as if he had any sort of plan anyway, you can't accomplish anything in the long run merely by responding to negative stimuli.

RAMBLING WRECK: Being in charge isn't as easy as it looks, you know. You never get the resources you need. There's always some tosser who's after your job, or who couldn't do your job in a millennium of Sundays but who offers running color commentary to everyone else as to what a balls-up you're making of things.

ALEXIS: Well, you're no coward, anyway (nor is he, come to think of it)--it takes some nerve to come online here and say that!

RAMBLING WRECK: Want to take this to a Private Room?

6.  
Avon slotted the chip into his palmreader. Battle Computer #6, Disk 8, four malfunctions...he put down the palmreader, picked up the laser probe, and started to trace the defective connections.

Out of sheer boredom one day a few months earlier, Avon had been stripping down one of Life Support Back-Up Systems (idly wondering how many bits would be left over THIS time when he put it back together; if anyone saw, he could just say that he was redesigning it for greater efficiency) when it occurred to him to look at the inside of the backplate.

Of course--Galactic Standards Organization Standard #14,803 called for all electronic equipment to have a schematics-and-diagnostic chip fastened in the equivalent of the upper right-hand inside corner. Which made it child's play to detect and repair any faults that Auto-Repair didn't handle.

Avon wasn't surprised that Blake had never figured this out--Blake was never particularly worried about how you got results as long as you got them--but he did wonder about Jenna. She was perfectly inclined to let Avon maintain the ship. {{I wonder if it means that she's used to a large crew, with specialized repair personnel, and not a two- or three-person ship where everyone has to do everything}} he thought. {{That's interesting...no, it isn't.}}

He began to think about what he was going to post. He was a bit concerned at first about whether he could be traced, but after four levels of anonymity, he opened the account in the name of an Aquitar Project co-worker he had particularly disliked, on the assumption that no one would probe any further than that.

7.  
BENT ENGINEERS>MESSAGE BOARDS>PRIVATE MESSAGES  
_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
Top or bottom?_

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:  
Oh, it all depends. If a partner has some sort of fixation on doing one, then the other. If I get to choose, bottom more often than not._

_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
Jolly lucky for me that some men feel the way you do, but it's hard for me to understand. Isn't the nature of being a man, to want to invade, to explore, to penetrate?_

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:  
I don't believe in natures. As Darling Oscar said, it's a crying shame that there should be one law for the man and another for the woman. I believe in no laws for anybody.

And anyway it makes just as much sense to talk about a mouth or an arse or a cunt "surrounding" or "encircling" your prick as to talk about it "penetrating" an orifice. But when it's all going right, then there's just nothing like the feeling of being completely open, completely and gorgeously taken, it's like having your own private sun._

_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
Do you go with women then? I thought you wouldn't be here if you weren't bent._

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:  
Don't worry about that, I've been told I could hide behind a corkscrew. It'll never replace sex but yes, in my humble opinion going to bed with women can be very good fun.

Jammy bastards though--they can go ahead and have an orgasm whenever they want one. Sometimes I've had to do so many differential equations to hold back that I've opened my eyes and discovered that I was more interested in the equations than the sex partner._

_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
Oddly enough, that's not a problem I can ever remember having. I don't know--women have always been good friends and respected colleagues for me, but they've never engaged my erotic imagination. Maybe because they're too different to us._

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:  
Not so different after all, really. It's like the 98% overlap of our DNA with chimpanzees. Everyone has skin, mouths, hands, greed, anxiety..._

8.  
"Everything but the bloodhounds nippin' at her behind," Avon said, when the distress call came in from a tiny, embattled rebel garrison.

"Stick a cork in it, just this once," Blake said, "They need our help."

"Blake, I've never heard of these people," Jenna said. "And I checked Avalon's secure contacts database, and they're not on there."

"It must be a new group, then," Blake said.

"It seems rather pointless of them to advertise their sympathies on a common frequency," Avon said. "It seems unlikely to attract the sort of attention they want. Cally, how much did you tell Vikaalu about our future plans? She might have sold us out."

She flushed angrily. "Nothing," she said. "That was uncalled for."

"Ah, yes," Avon said. "Number 213 of things I don't particularly want to have carved on my tombstone: 'He was greatly beloved by everyone who got him killed.'" {{And anyway, that would imply that Blake had some future plans...just try betraying a random number generator.}}

"Blake, I'll go with you," Gan said.

"Thanks," Blake said. "Luckily, I needn't go far to find loyalty and courage."

They were back a few hours later. Gan leaned heavily on Blake's shoulder, favoring his sprained ankle. The mud and blood on their shredded clothing made the situation look worse than it really was: out of a few loads of buckshot, some of the pellets connected, but most of them glancingly.

"Sit down, my friend," Blake said, as he went off to the medical bay to fetch the wheelchair.

Gan glared at Avon, daring him to mention the "t" word. He didn't--in fact, he didn't often say "I told you so," but waiting to see if he would in any particular instance was like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Blake, I'm perfectly all right," Gan said, as Blake fussed over him. "Having to duck away from a platoon of troopers is all in a day's work, by now. And as for the ankle, it's fine now that you've rolled the tissue regenerator over it--I could dance Swan Lake on it."

Blake, who felt eminently in need of coddling himself but not expecting to get any, continued to fuss. He longed for the moment when he could go online--the sympathetic company would be a relief. He checked his wristchron: Alexis was never online this time of day. {{That's all right, though}} he thought. {{I can look in on that really interesting discussion about the prion chip on the Cutting Edge Tech board. And I can leave a message for Alexis.}}

9.  
_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
Hullo again--Is it just about sex, then? That's what straight people say--that they're better than us because that's all we care about, and they care about stability. And fidelity. And love._

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:   
Love? It's a mug's game. I've tried it. All it does it force you to risk everything, then lose it all.

As for fidelity, don't believe everything people say when they're trying to make you feel inferior. There's no point in surrendering to hetero-worship. When Victoria ruled in the First Calendar--the apogee of nominal virtue--every eighth house in London was a bordello._

_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
Who did the counting? I think you're taking it on faith, my friend, good to know that there's something you believe in.

I was having a bad day--now, that's a surprise!--and I got through it by thinking that eventually I'd have a moment to myself so I could log on. Isn't it odd, how intimate these exchanges can feel? Just electrons at the mercy of cyberspace, and yet a sort of relationship is created._

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:  
My dear Wreck: Now we see through a chip darkly, and then face to face. Perhaps it's the distantiation that makes it possible to open up. If you thought we'd ever meet, then you'd slam shut like a clamshell approaching a Security roadblock._

_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
I wish we could meet. Sometimes I'm very lonely. Going places I don't want to go, doing things I wish I didn't have to do._

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:  
Oh, chin up, old thing. You sound like an individual of some personal resources, and if you cultivate them then at least you'll have someone intelligent to talk to and you won't have to keep watching your back all the time.

But then again, there's no sign of trust and intimacy like letting a fellow bring his own handcuffs._

_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
You do have a talent for bringing things crashing down to Earth--or wherever. But don't stop posting, I'll convert you yet._

{{Busman's holiday,}} Avon thought. {{One of them trying to convert me F2F, one of them online...}} Then he froze. {{It couldn't be...I know it's the sort of thing that always does happen to me, but...}} He traced the account back to the Liberator. There was nothing he could do but laugh.

10.  
Toward the end of the watch, Jenna consulted her wristchron at shorter and shorter intervals. When Cally came onto the Flight Deck to take over the watch, Jenna waved at her and bounded off the Flight Deck.

Craning his neck, Blake could see that she went down the left-hand branch of the corridor leading past the teleport bay. He glanced at all the screens, saw nothing alarming, and headed off in Jenna's direction.

A couple of minutes later, he followed her through the crew room door. Vila, Gan, and Avon were already gathered around a very large object.

"What's that?" Blake asked. "No, of course, I know what it is" (it was a pool table, although on Earth it is considered tasteless to make them out of purple-and-red-grained boontleya wood) "But how did it get here?"

"We made it," Gan said proudly. "I like making things."

"The wicked shall flourish like the green baize tree," Avon said. "Did you know that you can get a very good color-fast green by dipping ovine microfiber into vesalium triphosphate and fusing it at 200 degrees?"

"It's splendid," Blake said faintly. "Why didn't anybody say?" {{*I* like making things. And if they're going to cooperate on something for once, why does it have to be with my back turned?}}

"Oh, well," Jenna said. "You've been so busy. And it wasn't an...official kind of project, just something among ourselves. The Federation doesn't exactly tremble at the thought that we might someday, somewhere, have a pool table."

{{When did I become the Freudian patriarch, the spinster schoolmarm?}} Blake wondered. {{When I became the Boss, obviously. But I canceled shoreleave to keep them safe, not to be a killjoy. Back in the day, when I still had friends, and a family, and a home, I remember that I was a positively jovial sort of fellow. I remember that...no, what I remember is fuck-all...but what I reconstruct is that I liked to have fun and I liked to see other people happy. Hell, for all I know, I used to know how to shoot pool.}}

Meanwhile, Avon, his gaze fixed on Blake, was grinding a pool cue into the cube of chalk.

"That's not very efficient," Blake said.

"That depends on your objective," Avon said. He freed the shining, bright balls from their prison, sent them scattering, and sank the first, easy shot.

"Two ball in the side pocket," Avon said.

"Are you crazy?" Jenna asked. "Even I couldn't make that shot."

Avon stroked the narrow end of the pool cue a few times up and down against his knuckles, and bent further forward to line up the shot.

Willing himself not to glance back over his shoulder to assess the effect on Blake, he glided forward until he had his upstage knee on the pool table. {{If these trousers split, I shall be forced to decapitate myself}} he thought.

He didn't make the shot. "I told you that you couldn't make that shot," Jenna said, which gave Blake the only moment of satisfaction in the whole transaction.

Avon backed down to the floor, dusted off his hands, and said, "All right then. Gan, I believe it was hydroponic bank four where you say the oxygen saturation valve is stuck?"

"Yes, I'll show you," Gan said.

"No, don't go, Ole'," Jenna said. "Come over on this side, I'll show you the masse shot again."

"How about you, Blake?" Vila asked. "Can you shoot stick?"

"I don't know," Blake said. "But you play, maybe I'll try my hand later."

At the end of the game, Vila owed Jenna seventeen credits. Later, when she realized the utter impossibility of collecting either in cash or in overtime shifts, she upped the stakes to ten thousand credits a game. That way, she wouldn't feel so bad about never seeing the money.

11.  
_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
Dear Alexis--Sometimes I don't understand myself. How can I be drawn to someone who constantly makes me angry? Or, how can the anger survive even curiosity, much less attraction, friendship, or anything more?_

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:  
The will to power has its own pleasures, my friend. Not just, as you said, to penetrate, but to dominate. Harmless enough, as long as you have reason to believe that the contents of the bodice want it ripped._

_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
What about gentleness, then--isn't the bedroom a refuge from what we find ourselves in--and what we find in ourselves--in an often brutal world? What about tenderness?_

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:  
Vanilla!_

_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
An often misunderstood flavour. You're used to it meaning "rubbish they didn't bother to put any taste into," but if you'd ever been to the old Wiener Konditorei in SudamericaDome, then you'd know something about...well, subtlety. Richness. Something that doesn't yield everything immediately, but has to be discovered._

_ALEXIS to RAMBLING WRECK:  
In which direction are you applying the pathetic fallacy--to yourself or to your fantasy partner?_

_RAMBLING WRECK to ALEXIS:  
Both, I suppose. That's how they do horoscopes and mentalist acts, isn't it? Everyone wants to be special. Everyone thinks they have hidden depths._

{{I don't see why I bother}} Blake thought. {{I'm trying to be honest, and he's just going to be clever back at me.}} Then he terminated this line of thought, because what he did for a living was bang his head on stone walls, so he really did have to keep bothering.

12.  
"Blake," Blake said into the commlink. "Avon, where are you?"

"Subcontrol Three."

"What the hell are you doing there?"

"Power consumption for Portside Nine is two percent higher than for Eight or Ten. I'm trying to figure out why."

Blake broke the connection and wandered down to Subcontrol Three. "Two percent isn't much of a difference," Blake said. "Here, I've got a thermos flask of tea...d'you want some?"

Avon shot a glance at Blake, over the teacup. "Either Eight and Ten have somehow spontaneously improved their efficiency, or something went wrong with Nine, and I'd better arrest the slide before it deteriorates any further. I might stay alive a bit longer if the ship performs optimally against the next ridiculous demand you place on it."

"I didn't ask you...."

"I noticed. I'll put up a plaque when I figure out what's happened to the engine."

"You needn't think you're irreplaceable," Blake said. "I did perfectly well for over thirty years before I met you, and I'd do just as well or better again without you."

{{Yes, you were brilliant at getting your underlings slaughtered and getting yourself mind-wiped...}} "And that's why you're in the fucking Elysee Palace right now making lofty statesmanlike pronouncements."

"And that's why you're counting your money in your castle keep. If you can't be grateful to me for protecting you, at least be grateful to Zen and the ship."

"Protecting me my arse!!!"

"Where's Sigmund Freud when you need him?"

"Where's Mao Tse-Tung? I'm goddamned if I know what kind of regime you're trying to set up, at least I know it wouldn't be fascist, can't see you making the trains run on time."

"What makes you so insecure about your much-vaunted intelligence that you can't concede that anyone else might have a brain as well? Perhaps you think that without the barrage bombing we'd discover that your brain is average-sized as well?"

As a connoisseur of scorn, Avon had to approve the "average-sized," although as someone whose ambitions to have his height estimated at about two meters had gone unfulfilled, he took it in bad part.

"As compared to whose? Yours, Gan's, Vila's, or your respected friends and colleagues?"

Determined to wipe that smirk off Avon's face, Blake grabbed a double handful of black velvet and its underlying pearl-grey silk and half-lifted, half-pushed Avon against the control room wall.

"Damn you!" he said. "That was the nicest thing we had, and now you've spoiled it!"

He immediately felt ashamed of himself, for acting like a barbarian and losing so many points. He was going to dust off his hands and walk away, but was unable to do so--his hands were trapped between their two bodies, as Avon seized him and kissed him very seriously.

Evidence of informed consent--(either that or Avon was trying to perform a bone marrow biopsy through two sets of clothing)--removed all of the guilt but also some undetermined but large percentage of the fun. Blake both did and didn't want to be given what he didn't want to want to take. {{I'd better assert myself before I get submitted to any more}} he thought.

To Blake's chagrin, Avon repossessed his right wrist, only to look at the wristchron. "We couldn't get far in any event," Avon said. "I'm on watch in eight minutes." He slid out from between the wall and Blake, who was silently cursing him for every sort of reprehensible behavior up to and culminating in cock-teasing.

Blake rapidly considered, and then discarded for manifest impossibility, various potential remarks along the lines of, "Oh, hell, just this once you can skip it," "I'll tell Vila to work a double shift," and "Why don't you go wake up Jenna and ask her to take your shift so we can fuck?" So there was nothing to be done but let Avon tuck his shirt back in, re-fasten his jacket, and head off to the Flight Deck.

13.  
Fifteen minutes later, Blake strode effortfully to the teleport bay, where Cally was re-injecting the teleport bracelets. "Hullo, Cally, you can stand down now...I'll take over," Blake said.

"It's all right...I'm not tired, and it's been perfectly quiet lately. Although that could change in a moment, of course."

"I would...Cally, I would appreciate if you let me take over for you."

Cally gave him an odd look and complied.

Blake found Avon in the galley, washing up the lunch dishes (albeit standing rather further back from the sink than usual), occasionally glancing up at the remote vid of the Main Screen to make sure nothing had popped up and unleashed its artillery.

There was in fact a dishwasher, but then Avon found a gold-trimmed Meissen dinner service in the Treasure Room and insisted on using it ("There's no point in having good china if you're going to keep it in the cupboard until Harvest Festival or Solstice") but equally insisted on washing it up by hand to preserve the gilding.

"I told Cally I'd stand in for her," Blake said, polishing a plate on a dishcloth. "She didn't seem best pleased, though."

"Give me a child until he is seven...an Auron education, you see. The reason the Auronar got ahead of the pack in cloning technology is that their distaste for sex is so extreme that they were dying out, petri dishes and embryo implantation and all. She tries to imagine, but she can't, why anyone would actually do anything like that for fun."

"And I suppose you can't see why anyone would actually do anything like that for love."

"You can't have been listening to what I said. That--well, you know. It's not healthy. It's too dangerous."

Blake guffawed. "Said what?"

"Well, I've always thought I was the epitome of mental health," Avon said solemnly. "But nobody but the Voices ever agrees with me."

14\.   
"I'd best be getting to the deck," Avon said. Blake followed him. "Oughtn't you to be getting to sleep?"

"I couldn't," Blake said. "I'll sit up with you."

Avon did the systems check, updated the maintenance log, and sat down on the sofa, giving a poor pretense of concentrating on the clipboard holding the diagram for the cryptic crossword he was designing.

"We have to keep fighting," Blake said abruptly. "What else could we do?"

"I don't know...I could teach you to shoot pool. Oh, you don't me you and me, you mean you and me and the crew and this large slice of alien technology that you wouldn't worship if you had to tune it up day in and day out. Well, what about luxurious idleness?"

"It wouldn't work," Blake said. "I've no taste for luxury and you've no taste for idleness. I know you say that you'd rather spend ten hours machining a nacelle cowling than five minutes talking to Gan...but you do spend the ten hours."

"I can think of dozens of laboratories where I'd rather spend it."

"None of them on Cygnus Alpha. You managed to get yourself into quite a lot of trouble before you met me, you know."

Avon couldn't come up with an answer for that, so they remained silent for a couple of minutes.

"Handcuffs!" Blake said. "Really?"

Avon grinned at him. "It depends. Got your attention, didn't it?"

"Polymorphous perversity?"

"To an extent. The feather,not the whole chicken. I should think that you'd favor the model of decentralized uprisings against the tyranny of a small hegemony."

"If you call this a small hegemony," Blake said, uncrossing his legs, "You've been letting those stroke books of yours go to your head."

"How did you know?" Avon asked, curious.

"It's hard to conceal anything in a small group."

"Oh, I don't know--in the last few weeks alone there was a pool table and an epistolary love affair."

"But they got found out. When did you realize, by the way? That it was me?"

Avon thought back. "Three weeks ago Tuesday."

"Perhaps realizing was why I never tried to visualize Alexis...in case he turned out not to look like you."

"Once I knew, I always heard your messages in your voice. Perhaps before."

The commlink chimed. "Are you sure you're all right?" Cally said. "I'll be glad to finish my shift."

"Thank you, that's very kind of you," Blake said. He ended the connection, and turned to Avon. "I'll go back to my cabin, I'm going mad here, not being able to touch you without engaging in some very unsuitable behavior."

"I'll come to your cabin at...off-shift plus...call it ten minutes. To take a shower and so forth. Don't worry, I always take care of the mise-en-place before I start cooking."

"Not a clue," Blake said. "Thank God I didn't put you in charge of communications."

"Why?" Avon said. "You put Vila in charge of weapons, after all. I assumed it was because you're insane, but perhaps you were trying to expand our repertoire."

15.  
Blake went back to his cabin, paced back and forth for a while, stretched out on the bed for a moment and woke up after two hours of a thin doze when he dreamed of pacing back and forth. He watched twenty minutes of a viscube and even practiced a few scales on the portable harmoniboard that it took a blessed fifteen minutes to locate in the welter at the back of his cupboard.

But whether one anticipates delight, disappointment, jury verdicts, or medical test results, it never gets any earlier, and eventually Avon tapped on the door.

Blake gazed at him beatifically. He looked damp and desirable and nervous, which did not reduce his allure in any way. He no longer wore the jacket, just the same charcoal-grey trousers and lighter grey shirt.

Blake gazed in dismay at the asymmetric complex of clasps and ties that fastened the shirt. "What is that, the entrance exam for a queer Mensa chapter?"

"Ruin it," Avon said, and they both gasped at the sound of tearing fabric. Blake used the remains of one sleeve to tug Avon toward the bed, then grasped both his shoulders and pushed Avon down on the bed, hard enough to bounce.

After taking a moment to Loom and enjoy Looming, Blake reached down between his colleague's legs. {{Average-sized}} he thought, with a mocha mix of disappointment and schadenfreude.

Blake's shirt was so loosely laced that he didn't bother to untie the strings, just lifted the whole shirt over his head. He slid down, his body clasping Avon's where he sprawled across the bed. {{Skin to skin}} Blake thought deliriously.

"Careful...boot heels," Avon said, which turned out to be the last statement for a while involving actual words.

Avon's last thought that could be expressed in coherent words was, {{Dammit, it's worse than I expected}} as he felt himself trapped between two fires--thin, inside his skin; golden and thick as lava, outside. There was a lizard-brain banquet, so many smells and cool textures to explore, but even that degree of initiative soon lapsed.

He couldn't think and feel this much at the same time, and he didn't get a chance to pick one.

Blake had enough strength to buoy him up, if he wanted to relax, but there was nowhere to relax amid the sensations that tore him apart and re-wove him.

16.  
"My God!" Avon said, shaking his head to reconnect from the very-far-away he'd been.

"I knew you'd twig eventually," Blake said comfortably.

"I'm usually a little...more participatory," Avon said.

"Oh, if anything, I was flattered," Blake said. "I wouldn't have suspected that you were only selectively inhibited. There's a ruined castle in FranciaDome that gives sound-and-light shows. I never got round to seeing one, but it must have been just like that. But I do think it was mean of you not to dedicate a number to Servalan. I'm sure she could hear you."

Blake was unable to see if Avon blushed, but surmised this was so, from the temperature increase in the face buried in his chest.

Blake stretched as luxuriantly as anyone can do once enlaced with a systems analyst. "If you do have any recondite techniques in your repertoire, you can try them in the five minutes or so before I expect to fall asleep."

It was not particularly recondite, but it did have the effect of surprising Blake. Avon slipped one arm beneath Blake's head, rested his own head on Blake's shoulder, clasped Blake's hand, and said, "Dear friend."

"Me old china," Blake said.

**Author's Note:**

> The classic movie version is "The Shop Around the Corner," one of many remakes is "You've Got Mail," and the musical version is "She Loves Me," which includes a song called..."Vanilla Ice Cream."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Two Ball in the Side Pocket](https://archiveofourown.org/works/943080) by [aralias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/pseuds/aralias)




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